Information security is crucial

Information security is crucial, if we shall maintain some order in our computers. We all like to have privacy, not least when we make contact with friends and business partners over e-mail or voice-mail. We also want to keep our documents and files for us, until we want to share them with someone in particular. Thus, information security includes the ethical question of when it is justifiable to access data not belonging to you.

Let us now look at following categories: Confidentiality, integrity, availability and non-repudiation. I will make an experiment by placing everyone of these elements in an ethical environment and see what consequences it may have on the information security per se.

Confidentiality
In fact, we all want to have computing reliable and private. You may suggest that all information should be free, but then there would be no need for security or for intellectual property. If an employer wants to read all the e-mail his employee get at work, is this legal? Moreover, is it ethical?

According to Swedish law, there are no rules, which would prohibit the employer from taking part of the information arriving to the company in one way or another. In other words, he or she has the right to monitor all the e-mail coming to the employees and leaving the company by their computers. Nevertheless, being legal does not mean that it is also ethical. You could also argue that such a behaviour would be a breach of confidentiality.

The well known web browser Netscape has with its 4.7 established a smart way to gather information about the user of Netscape Communicator with the new Smart Download. The cookie that Communicator places on the hard disk plays the key part in this reprehensible game. Netscape uses its cookie in a unlawful way. Information about sites you have visited and other things are stored on the hard disk. As you can imagine, this behaviour is not only unlawful, it is also very much unethical.

Integrity
Integrity is very important to every user of information. We all want the information we use or seek to be genuine. We want to be sure that the information ia exactly how it was when the author wrote it down. We also want the information stored in our computer to remain untouched of unknown hands. We wish that the information we get from the Internet shall be completely reliable. Naturally an alteration or modification of text or information is unlawful if somebody not authorized tampers with your information. It is also ethically condemnable.

Availability
Availability means that system services are available when they are needed. You say that an information system has good availability when authorized users can get at system resources when they want to. Accordingly the system has a good availability as continuation of the integrity.

Non-repudiation
The sender of a message should not be able to deny having sent the communication if he or she did send it. Nor should it be possible for the sender to claim that the contents of the communication received are not the same as what the sender sent. Non-repudiation is essential to electronic commerce when it comes to a trading partner's willingness to rely on a communication.

Born in Turku, Finland, he is now living in Stockholm, Sweden. He has been a criminal defense lawyer for 38 years and he has had a law firm of his own. In the year 2000 he took a Master in Law and IT at the University in Stockholm. Now Carl is retired.The hobbies are Music, Writing, Film and Theater, Tennis and Golf.He is also very fond of genealogy. Carl speaks Swedish, Finnish, German and English.

Title Post: Information security is crucial
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